Mike Cardillo: Seventh stage of coping with grief: Accept the AAC

Updated 7:02 pm, Sunday, June 30, 2013

Hey everybody ... I'm back. Did you miss me? The sports staff at the Post have been kind enough to allow me to write in this space from time to time, so I'll apologize in advance, because you haven't heard the last from me.

Between now and the last time you heard from me, I've continued to hold out hope that I'll eventually wake up from this nightmare of UConn joining -- and playing in -- the American Athletic Conference. Either that or maybe somebody is going to pop out from behind the Jonathan statue in front of Gampel Pavilion in Storrs and say this was all an elaborate prank.

Alas, life in AAC appears to be reality. The conference even has a logo, a slogan, a website and everything else you'd expect.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend, who is also a UConn alum, and I were outside of his new house in Fairfield sipping on some beers, and we had to take to our iPhones to figure out who was in the AAC and who wasn't (and who are just around for football). By the time it was over, both our heads hurt ... and we still weren't exactly sure of the member schools comprising the AAC, other than UConn and Cincinnati. Syracuse, Georgetown, Providence, Villanova and UConn's other long-standing rivals were long gone to greener pastures.

At this point, it all means there are three routes despondent UConn fans and alumni like myself can take.

The first? Turn your back on college sports, citing the greed and corruption of the NCAA that helped destroy the traditional conference alignment we'd been familiar with, blowing up a great basketball league -- the Big East -- for the sake of more money for football. No matter what, the AAC won't be a shadow of the old Big East, where many of UConn's important modern sports memories were forged. A world without UConn at the Big East tournament in Madison Square Garden is tough to stomach.

Living without college sports and by extension UConn would probably be a lot easier than it sounds, even if there's not a lot going on during the winter months when college hoops takes center stage. You could use the time to reconnect with your family, read, volunteer, etc.

Don't feel like going down the cold turkey route? You still have too many strong feeling for Storrs and the Huskies but aren't sold on this AAC thing?

The good news is you can keep complaining about it. Tell your representative, your senator, the governor and even UConn president Susan Herbst. Be the squeaky wheel. Refuse to donate money when UConn comes calling or say you won't until the school can figure out a way to worm itself into the Atlantic Coast Conference or any place that isn't a watered-down, traditionless version of Conference USA.

The first and second options take a little bit of work, or at least make you change your sports rooting lifestyle. It's not easy to simply turn your back on a school you've rooted for and supported most of your life. The complaining route, which means unhappily waiting around until something happens on the ACC front, might end up being a complete waste of time. We the fans have (or had) little, if any, power when the NCAA conferences played musical chairs. The powers that be running big-time athletics count on us for our undying ability to pay for their product, not our opinions.

That leaves the final option: acceptance.

It's a fitting option since it's the last part of the seven stages of coping with grief. The Big East we've all grown to love as we once knew it is dead. UConn is actually stuck in something called the AAC.